Page 191 of Handsome Devil
Jesus.I could hear myself, and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t even sure why we were fighting about this.
I was just mad. I wanted to demonize him.
Katie was right about that.
I had so much ugly baggage from my youth, and some of it was because of this man, and he didn’t even know it.
He sighed and dragged a hand over his face. “Honestly… it was Johnny, okay? And I hate to tell you that because I don’t want you hating my friends. But I also don’t want you hating me for something I never fucking did.”
Johnny. Really?
I’d ran into Johnny O’Reilly at a lot of parties the last few years. He and Katie’s rock star husband both ran in an overlapping crowd. And despite the fact that Johnny didn’t even seem to remember me from high school—and I hardly reminded him that I was someone he’d forgotten—he’d always been friendly with me. Flirtatious, even.
“He said I was fugly?”
Dane sighed, obviously feeling a little bad about it. Even though it wasn’t his fault Johnny O was a dick. “Why do you even care?”
“I don’t.”
“It was just high school, Devi. And Johnny’s… Johnny.”
“Yeah. Well, it’s easy for you to say ‘It was just high school.’ You were king of the damn school. You could’ve had anyone you wanted. People lined up to get your attention. You don’t even know what it’s like to be a nobody.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.” He didn’t sound proud of it.
“So, you knew you were better than everyone, right? Did you even like that girl you brought to grad? Or is this an ongoing pattern of yours? You choose to be with women over and over you don’t even like?”
The chill in his eyes dropped to that special level of ice-cold that made me almost shiver across the room. He didn’t like that one. Or the question that it implied, maybe.
Did he even like me, or did he not?
“No,” he said.
“What was it, then? You weretryingto make me jealous?”
“Was that what you were doing with Shane?”
I bit my tongue on that.Fucking busted.That was exactly what I was doing with Shane. But I was seventeen, for fuck’s sake. And aching for Dane to notice me.
There was no way I’d tell him that right now, though, looking into those cold eyes.
Did I seriously think that he was starting to feel something for me? A man who was so damn cold and self-protective, the mere hint of conflict made him retreat behind his ice wall?
No. He didn’t feel anything for me. This was a business deal.
And I was a fucking idiot to start weaving fantasies that it might be more.
We were incompatible, from that first second we met. It was a chemical reaction. Gun powder tossed into a flame. We exploded at moment one, and we’d never been able to put ourselves back together.
We were still incompatible.
Yet I still wanted him to like me. I still hoped he’d want more.
How fucked-up was that?
“How am I supposed to trust you,” he said coldly, when I said nothing, “if you won’t even answer my questions about simple, stupid shit, like high school?”
“How am I supposed to trust you? You didn’t tell me there’s another heir to your fortune.”
